The long lobby: Gay rights group asserts itself

Tom Witt, left, executive director of the gay-rights group Equality Kansas, confers with Kansas state Rep. Steve Brunk, a Wichita Republican, before a committee hearing.

When Senate leaders said a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to gay couples wouldn’t go forward until it passed muster with several groups including the state's LGBT community, it sounded like a major philosophical shift within the solidly Republican Kansas Legislature.

After all, the bill had just sailed through the House despite the protests of Tom Witt and the Kansas Equality Coalition, the state's main gay-rights lobbying organization.

But Witt says stopping that bill in the Senate — with a major assist from the state's business community — was the culmination of years of groundwork by he and other advocates. They now want to build on that work to add discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and transgender Kansans into the state law.

Witt was formally hired to lobby in 2005 after working as a volunteer in the gay community's biggest legislative defeat, the state's constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Since then his group has successfully fended off bills that it believes discriminate against homosexual Kansans — lesser-publicized wins leading up to this year's nationally known victory.

After years of playing defense, Witt and the coalition say it is time to balance the legal playing field.

"There may be areas in statute that can be clarified or perhaps strengthened to protect religious liberties," Witt told a legislative committee last week. "We would support those efforts, with two conditions: the discriminatory language of previous bills is not part of that discussion, and that sexual orientation and gender identity be included in the Kansas Act Against Discrimination."

In requesting the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the state's nondiscrimination law, Witt's group is building on public awareness created by the battle over the "denial-of-service" provisions in House Bill 2453.

Much of the opposition to that bill centered on fears of "No Gays Allowed" business policies similar to segregation-era "Jim Crow" laws.

But Witt says owners of private businesses in Kansas are already allowed to have such policies because homosexuality and gender identity aren’t protected classes in the state's nondiscrimination statutes.

“I don’t know that a lot of people understand that,” Witt said.

The major changes in HB 2453, he said, were to allow government employees to deny services and to protect individual private-sector employees who deny services to gay couples against their employers' wishes — a change to the state's "at-will" employment law that spurred the business community's opposition.

Witt said he hears from gay Kansans denied service by private businesses about once or twice a year. Reports of Kansans getting fired or kicked out of their rental homes based on sexual orientation are more common.

"Discrimination is real in the state of Kansas," Witt said. "People do lose their jobs for being gay and lesbian in the state. People do get evicted.”

Right now those Kansans have no legal recourse, he said, except in a few select cities that have included sexual orientation in local nondiscrimination ordinances.

Witt counts blocking legislative proposals that would have weakened those ordinances as some of the victories his group has won since 2005.

Witt says he is serious about adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the state's nondiscrimination statutes despite the socially conservative makeup of the Legislature.

An information hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee last week suggested that would inflame concerns about religious liberty. Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, R-Shawnee, asked about the case of a New Mexico photographer sued for refusing to work a gay wedding, and Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona, said a Catholic adoption agency in Illinois faced sanctions for its policies on serving gay couples.

Both of those states have nondiscrimination clauses that include sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the ACLU.

Helen Alvare, a professor at George Mason University who spoke at last week's hearing, said gay marriage is likely to be imposed on Kansas by courts soon and the state should move to protect citizens whose Judeo-Christian beliefs are incompatible with participation in such services.

"It means so much more than the freedom to live one's own marriage according to religious beliefs, to the point that asking religious citizens to facilitate or cooperate with a same-sex marriage is like asking them to practice another religion," Alvare said.

The Kansas Family Policy Council, The Church of God in Christ and the Kansas Catholic Conference joined Alvare's call for more religious conscience protections.